Dale Bailey

Dale Bailey (born January 24, 1968) is an American author of speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Quotes

Short fiction

The Resurrection Man's Legacy (2003)

Page numbers from the hardcover first edition, published by Golden Gryphon Press, ISBN 1-930846-22-3

See Dale Bailey's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details

• I am reminded of this now, for recollection, like archaeology, is a matter of sifting through ruins. Memory is frail and untrustworthy, tainted by desire; what evidence remains is fragmentary, shrouded in the mystery of the irretrievable past. You cannot recover history; you can only reconstruct it, build it anew from the shards that have survived, searching always for the seams between the strata, those places of demarcation between the city that was and the city that would be, between the self that you were and the self that you have become.
  • The Resurrection Man’s Legacy (pp. 11-12)

• You must never run away from the truth, Jake, however unpleasant. Because once you begin running, you can never stop.
  • The Resurrection Man’s Legacy (p. 16)

• And so commenced my central obsessions, those legacies that have shaped my life. From that time onward, my youth was consumed by baseball and books. During that summer and the summers that followed – all through my high school career – Ford and I worked in the quiet isolation of the backyard. I took to baseball with a kind of innate facility, as if an understanding of the game had been encoded in my genes. I relished the sting of a line-drive into well-oiled leather, the inexorable trajectory of a fly ball is it plummeted toward a waiting glove. I relish it still. There is an order and a symmetry to the game which counteracts the chaos that pervades our lives; even then, in some inchoate, inexpressible fashion, I understood this simple truth.
  • The Resurrection Man’s Legacy (pp. 22-23)

• I had broken the first commandment of political life, a commandment I had flogged relentlessly for the last year. Stay on message, stick to the talking points.
  Thou shalt not speak from the heart.
  • Death and Suffrage (p. 37)

• When it comes to death, sex, and money, everybody lies.
  • Death and Suffrage (p. 45)

• “You ever want to get away? You ever want to see the world?”
  “I’ve seen it, Kemp. It’s overrated.”
  • The Anencephalic Fields (p. 78)

• Back then, I’d asked Mama if she ever longed to see the world, and what she’d said in response had puzzled me. I’ve seen it, Kemp, she’d told me. It’s overrated.
  I didn’t have much doubt that she was right. But all the same, I thought, I probably ought to find out for myself.
  • The Anencephalic Fields (p. 99)

• You have to understand. The Germans were awful, they were often evil. But they were right in what they did that night, because those men, they had broken a taboo that should not ever be broken. And they had to be punished because unless you punish the people who do wrong, society falls apart. You can understand why those men did what they did, but people have to be punished or we’ll have chaos.
  • Quinn’s Way (p. 136)

• “I ain’t afraid of nothin.”
  “You’re a bigger fool than I took you for, then.”
  • The Census Taker (p. 164)

• It is evident that no two assassins are driven by precisely the same motives.
  Not that there aren’t broad categories.
  I can think of three. There is the madman, most common I suppose, fired by the blaze of his own obsessions. He hears the voice of God or he is anxious for the warrior’s paradise. He is the crazed fan, the car bomber.
  There is the killer motivated by greed. He works for the highest bidder, and takes pride in his skills. He is the mercenary, the hired gun, the hitman.
  Finally there is the man driven by the genuine belief that he is committing violence for utilitarian purposes – that his small evils are counterbalanced by a greater good. Of the three, he is most rare, most dangerous.
  And of course, he always runs the risk that he is one of the other type, and simply hasn’t the wisdom to see it.
  • Sheep’s Clothing (pp. 229-230)

• He wasn’t the first man who had sought to prevent violence through the use of violence, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.
  I wasn’t sure I didn’t like it either.
  • Sheep’s Clothing (p. 235)

• But it did not matter. An old lesson from the marines came back to me, a lesson from the hunt: you must never empathize with the enemy. You must kill him without fear or emotion, because if you do not he will certainly kill you. You must believe this, even if it is not true.
  • Sheep’s Clothing (p. 251)

• The wall clock ticked, dividing the silence into discrete segments of discomfort.
  • In Green’s Dominion (p. 259)

• “The pagan myths are everywhere once you know to look,” she said, “even the ecumenical calendar. Easter is May Day in Christian garb, and All Saints Day falls right after Halloween, the Druid holiday of Samhain.” She raised her eyebrows. “The old gods never die, they just put on new faces.”
  • In Green’s Dominion (p. 314)

• I believed then – and I believe still – that fiction driven by purely ideological goals is likely to be very poor fiction indeed.
  • Story Notes to Death and Suffrage (p. 323)

• My correspondent also quibbled that we can’t compare the death rate by handguns in the United States to those in other industrialized nations in part because the US death rate is inflated by firearm suicides. I can’t help wondering why anyone bothers making such distinctions – the mortician certainly doesn’t.
  The fact is, there’s a fundamental problem in using a gun for home protection. Burglars are unlikely to stand politely by while you unlock the gun cabinet and get the bullets out of the safe. For a gun to be of any use at all in such a case, it must be loaded and ready to hand. Those facts make it all too likely that the gun will be used on another family member in a moment of anger – or that it will fall into the hands of a child.
  As of this writing, Kayla Rolland is still dead.
  • Story Notes to Death and Suffrage (p. 324)

• All writers are unregenerate thieves, and the ones who deny it are also liars.
  • Story Notes to Quinn’s Way (p. 326)